![]() ![]() Power Games Inhabit Guibert’s Last Novel.George Cecil Ives: Out Poet, Lover of Bosie.Inside Ukraine: An lgbtq Leader Speaks Out.The Spark That Lit the Gay Publishing Boom.Perhaps it was similar to the amused cognitive dissonance of the middle-class matrons who were fans of Liberace’s campy performance while still believing he was straight. Although the medical literature of the 1870s had begun describing “sexual inversion” and the popular press was critical of foreign performers with “unnatural passions,” Hindle’s and Wesner’s personal lives were overlooked even as their stage act was wildly popular for its transvestism and its parody of gender-bending masculinity. One critic described the swell as “an idler with a snap, a butterfly with some virility.” For the popular, largely male audience, this dandy was simultaneously a figure of humor and of emulation, with his fashionable clothes and wealth that could attract beauties. Hindle and Wesner specialized in the song and banter role of the “swell,” who was a wealthy man of leisure. Her male impersonation act, with song and quick costume changes, was billed as “à la Hindle” and was successful from the East Coast to Texas. She diversified her performances as she grew older to include blackface minstrelsy. These days I know I’m a badass bitch, so I’d say it’s more like an 8.Ella Wesner was a Philadelphian who, like many male impersonators, had an early career as a dancer. ![]() I found the relentless march of capitalism suffocating, and it kept me in a cycle of depression. Rate your life out of 10 before, and now:īefore I’d say it was a 3.5 I was stuck within a structure and in a world I knew I didn’t want to be a part of. Book people of colour! Book trans people! Book non-binary people! We need your support. What can drag queens do to better support drag kings?īook them on your platforms! If you need supporting acts, don’t book white cis male drag queens because they can operate in any space. That’s no shade to drag queens, it’s just that as usual, it’s become another space where cis white men tend to dominate, and often, as drag kings, we only get recognition if a queen throws attention our way. As a drag king, you can often feel invisible, because drag queens get all the attention. In theory, this should mean that all drag artists can benefit – but it’s not always the case. To put that into perspective, I’m spending £35 on tape every week, which is more than I spend on food.ĭrag is having a moment globally, because of shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race, and is now considered by most to be the number one queer art form. I don’t wear a wig but many kings do, and just on a practical level, it costs £7 for a roll of binding tape, and I have to use one for every performance. For instance, I spend 2.5 hours on my make up before going on stage. It undermines how much work I – and other prinxes and kings – put into our acts. So I took the job in the kitchen to pay the bills while I started building my profile.Ī year into juggling both, life was a bit chaotic and I’d reached a point where I was getting enough drag bookings to support myself, and I just thought “fuck it, let’s go”.Īnother thing that gets on my nerves is that people always say that drag queens have to invest so much more time and effort into their look. But obviously it’s never just as simple as quitting your job and walking out on stage to packed audiences. I was at uni studying linguistics and international relations, and it just got to the point where I knew I wanted to be a performer, and it didn’t make sense to waste all that money studying. I do some sex work on the side to help pay the bills, mainly dancing in London’s first LGBTQIA+ strip club, Harpies, and some camming. People say “the customer is always right”, but I learned pretty quickly that actually, sometimes the customer is a dickhead! And when you’re a trans person of colour, your likelihood of being mistreated is much, much higher. When you work in the service industry there’s a revolving door of different people you interact with every day.
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